Letters to the Editor

Aug. 11, 2017

Ancient Wisdom

To the Editor:

Michael Schaub considers Matthew Klam’s “Who Is Rich?” (July 30) “a little too” cleverly named. Cleverer than he knows, perhaps. The question “Who is rich?” is from Avot, the most famous tractate of the Babylonian Talmud. It was asked by Rabbi Ben Zoma, and answered by him as well: “He who is happy with his lot.” Klam’s protagonist is certainly impoverished by that definition.

MICHAL WILLIAMS SOMERVILLE, MASS.

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Outsider Catholics

To the Editor:

Lorraine Adams’s review of Mary Gordon’s “There Your Heart Lies” (July 23) does not mention a sure influence on Gordon’s creation of the character Marian Rabinowitz, who straddles borders between Judaism and Christianity. That’s Simone Weil, whom Gordon brought to life in her novella “Simone Weil in New York.” Weil, like Marian Rabinowitz, joined the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and lived out in her own way “the contradictions and subtleties of her outsider Catholicism,” as, Adams suggests, Gordon also does in hers.

ERNEST RUBINSTEIN NEW YORK

The writer is an adjunct assistant professor of humanities at the N.Y.U. School of Professional Studies.

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Get Up, Stand Up

To the Editor:

In his review of “So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley,” Touré writes that the singer “spread an image of Jamaica around the world, and now everyone has a soft spot in his or her heart for that magical island.”

I can assure Touré that thousands of L.G.B.T. people have no such feelings. The island’s documented culture of homophobia, expressed in beatings, rapes, mob violence, murder and yes, music, gives the lie to that fantasy. Every time I hear the lilting melody of “One Love,” I have to add, “If you’re heterosexual.”

NICK D’ALESSANDRO PHILADELPHIA

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Democracy in Peril

To the Editor:

Fareed Zakaria dismisses the central argument of Edward Luce’s “The Retreat of Western Liberalism” (July 30) and says he is “not yet convinced that we must write obituaries for Western liberalism.” To support his critique, he cites recent elections in several European countries, the long-term expansion of the European Union and the benefits enjoyed by new member states. Poland, in particular, is held out as a model because it has been “secured economically, politically and militarily” by the E.U. and NATO.

Zakaria does not mention that the 2015 election of the Polish Law and Justice Party ushered in a dramatic turn toward authoritarianism. The European Commission is currently pursuing legal action against the Polish government for its assault on the freedom of the press and of the judiciary. Last month an attempt to place the courts under government control was halted, perhaps temporarily.

Zakaria also writes that “we all deserve criticism for missing the phenomenon of the ‘left-behinds’ and the economic and cultural forces that were roiling large parts of the country” before Donald Trump’s election. But those less attached to the fading ideals that govern Zakaria’s thinking may have been more attuned to the rise of populist nationalism than he allows. At the very least, we know a right turn when we see one.

MARK SORKIN CHICAGO

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To the Editor:

For Edward Luce, liberalism means “the tradition of liberty and democracy.” However, he seems to adopt the rightist view of liberty and democracy, whereby equality disappears. Under the rule of “liberalism,” labor unions have declined from one-third of all workers in the 1960s to some 10 percent today, resulting in lower wages. In 1965, the income ratio of the C.E.O.s of the top 350 firms to their workers’ wages was 20 to 1. Today, it is over 300 to 1. The wealthiest 0.1 percent held 7 percent of the nation’s wealth in 1978; this grew to 22 percent today. Twenty people own as much as the bottom half of the population. As for the liberal “international order,” eight men own as much as half of humanity. “Liberalism” has presided over the death of equality and therefore of democracy. Its demise shouldn’t be deplored, should it happen.

ROGER CARASSO SANTA FE, N.M.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at California State University, Northridge.

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To the Editor:

Extreme inequality — it used to be called poverty but is now defined much more broadly — the subject of “The Fate of the West” and “One Another’s Equals,” two books reviewed by Robert B. Reich (July 23), is arguably the most urgent existential threat to liberal democracy today. It is, however, by no means new, nor has it until recently been thought of as a threat.

Historically, poverty/inequality was universally accepted as part of the natural order. If it was seen to be a problem, it was as a problem of public order. The Marquis de Condorcet and Thomas Paine were the first to argue, at the very end of the 18th century, that poverty could be banished. Yet Benjamin Disraeli spoke in his novel “Sybil” (1845) of society being divided between “Two Nations: between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy … as if they were … inhabitants of different planets … not governed by the same laws. … THE RICH AND THE POOR.” He was writing of his own country, but his words were true of the whole world and still are. Meanwhile, the rich have never been so rich and powerful since the late Roman Empire. All of which is to say inequality is an intractable problem; we will be trying to come up with a viable solution for years to come.